Whether or not we realize it, every person possesses their own ideology. Individuals live their lives according to their own individual ideology that affects their economic, political, and social needs. Ideology affects everything in the media from news, fashion, entertainment, and communication. All programming is based on an ideology that the target audience shares. Many news entities like FOX base how they depict stories on the political views of its target audience. The same audience ideologies shape the programming on networks such as MTV, E!, and Bravo. As individuals our ideologies come from different critiques of our lives and the world. From religion to politics our ideologies are a compilation different critiques and critics who have studied and evaluated the world and culture for thousands of years. In the media we both receive critical critique and in return become critics of ourselves. Programming such as reality allows viewers to closely evaluate and judge others. The way that we see others lives influences us to evaluate ourselves and either model ourselves as such or deters us from what we see. Magazines aimed at audiences of younger females come under a lot of critique both good and bad because of the ideologies that they depict in the magazines.

Epistemology to me is somewhat confusing. When talking about the origin of knowledge and how people know what they know, it feels like an unanswerable question. From birth there are things that we just learn but how can we trace back to the beginning of time to find out how we learned to learn? How are we as a group supposed to know that what we learn and what are taught in life if the truth and what part of that is simply a belief? Is there really a way of knowing since in our culture we are all taught a somewhat standard way of thinking? I think the media uses this unknown grey area to their advantage. I think that a lot of times the media makes us believe things that aren’t really true in order to sway the audience into seeing a truth.

Pedagogy has been used to teach me most educational things that I know. Teachers spend years learning pedagogy in order to be able to teach students. No matter what level of education we reach pedagogy has a lot of emphasis on how we learn. This is used in the media on a lot of different levels. A simple example is in children’s programming. Shows use pedagogy to educate children through the media. But the media also uses pedagogy in a great deal of its content in order to teach the audience the message that the media wants us to learn. By learning the way viewers in different categories learns, the media teaches us behaviors and ideas many times without our knowledge.

Hegemony takes primary influence over the way we live our lives. Hegemony shows up in all sectors of life. Socially we are taught to view people who have a lot of things or money as higher class, so socially they have dominant influence. Economically people with more money have more power, and because the wealthy have more power, they have more influence in politics. Even though in some instances we have the majority, which we could turn into power, we aspire to be in higher class which is why these groups are able to influence us the way that they do.

The “Life Takes Visa” commercial is a view of today’s American ideology. Now days we move fast and we change and influence the world around us so that it can keep up with us. That is how we view the economy, politics, and social needs. Facebook and Twitter are ways that we have adapted our social lives to keep up with us. As a part of this ideology, I want to be able to do everything from where I am right now. Instantaneous communication from across the country, money transactions from my phone, and political updates twenty-four hours a day is apart of the ideology that things are constantly moving at a fast pace and it is my responsibility to keep up. I think that the way I go through my day is very similar to the way represented in the commercial. The old way of doing things frustrates me because it slows me down, but sometimes I do need and want to slow down because that constant fast pace can be stressful.

In the video of “Students in China,” I do not see a lot of similarities between the Chinese students and myself when it comes to school. The Chinese student’s days are very long and structured. With my day I have a lot of flexibility and less structure in what I do. The only instance in which I see similarities between myself and the Chinese students is with athletics. Being an athlete on scholarship that same strict and long schedule is similar to our athletic schedule. It can be strict and strenuous without the option of flexibility in schedule.

Arthur C. Clark’s quote makes a lot of sense to me because although I am young, if I were to think back to when I was very little but being shown the technology and gadgets that we have now it would be like magic to me. To people like my grandparents and parents who have trouble understanding how all this technology works and is possible, I am sure in their eyes it is like magic. One thing that comes to mind are the Nintendo Wii commercial where its like and old black and white episode of Lassie or something similar, and when the dog comes back with what it found, it was a Wii remote. The people in the commercial did not know how to react to what the dog found because it was a technology that they had never seen before. Back when I was in second grade I remember there being all kind of reports about flying cars and that some company guaranteed that we would have flying cars by the year 2000, and as a kid I remember thinking that by then we would be living like the Jetsons which was very magical to me. Even though 2000 came and went it is still very fascinating to see how far technology has come in just ten years.